Riding with us in our RV near his office in Culver City last week, a silver-haired Tom Hayden says with a hint of irony, but not a trace of resignation - "I am just an old politician."

Forty years ago, Hayden stood as the voice of youth. He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, participated in the civil rights movement, and became a leading anti-war activist, traveling to North Vietnam with his future wife, Jane Fonda. He was one of the Chicago Eight, charged with inciting riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention (where I and another reporter had the dubious honor of bailing him out of jail).

Unlike some other young revolutionaries of his generation, Hayden didn't turn into a cynic or a conservative when the radical agenda of the 1960s and 70s gave way to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Instead, he participated in progressive politics in Southern California, serving the state assembly and senate for nearly twenty years and working with local grassroots groups.

Hayden believes that the 2008 presidential election is far more than just another horse race between two men, or even two parties.

"The movement for Barack Obama is a genuine social movement inside the trappings of a presidential campaign," he says. "I think the Obama movement will produce the next wave of social activism in America for the next 20 or 30 years, whether he wins or loses."

In an essay endorsing Obama in the California primary last January, Hayden wrote: "Today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama's moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through."

In a sense, Hayden tells us, both Sarah Palin's and Barack Obama's candidacies represent different apocalyptic visions of the future. For Palin and her followers, the rapture will be their reward when Christ returns to earth to gather up the faithful. For Obama's youthful supporters, a grimmer fate awaits them, with no money for college, no decent jobs, no rights, and a world brought to "the edge of extinction" by global warming - unless we change course now.

Hayden thinks that African Americans never believed whites would vote for a black man - and now that they have, many fear that Obama will be killed.

"We have to elect him and we have to protect him ... I have no doubt there are a lot of people in this country who are planning to shoot him, and there is a climate being generated to whip them up ... But he's got tools as well. He's got protection. He's got grace."

And Hayden himself is looking toward the day when this historic campaign achieves its goal.

"I'd like to see those Obama girls playing on the White House lawn," he says.